For whom the Facebook bell tolls

Bell Nursery’s Facebook page is a success story. It started in 2010 on the whim of a marketing director. In four years, the page would garner close to 16,000 and play host to daily conversations between Bell and its customers. Bell (www.bellnursery.com), based in Burtonsville, Md., with satellite production facilities in Ohio and Virginia, accomplished its feat of growth with a steady dose of consistency, interactivity, and targeted advertising.
 

Defining consistency

Consistency is probably the most mentioned social media buzzword. It appears in every “How-to” article about growing your audience and increasing your followers. Consistency is almost always cited as a contributing factor to a successful social media presence. Somehow the word has become an amorphous symbol used to represent a number of social media strategies and tactics.

But developing your social media strategy shouldn’t only be about “consistency,” it must also be about trial and error. Many pages make the mistake of launching gimmicks to try and maintain their consistency. This can take the form of “Throwback Thursday” when growers post greying photographs of their old greenhouse, or ‘80s hairdos. But gimmick posting might not work for your page the same way it does for others.

Which isn’t to say those strategies can’t work. For some pages, gimmick days are huge successes and drive mountains of eyeballs to a page. And developing a timeline for your posts, and when your burgeoning audience of followers can expect them, is always recommended.

But social media doesn’t have a litany of hard and fast rules. What works for one successful social media page, might not work for you. Celebrity pages for the Kardashians or Rihanna (Facebook’s most popular person as of 2013), and hugely recognizable institutions like Walmart or YouTube, are going to operate differently from a greenhouse grower. You shouldn’t mimic their strategies; their base of growth is different from yours. You have to discover what consistency means for you, and that involves trial and error.

“It’s kind of like watering a crop, if you’re not going to do (social media) consistently I probably wouldn’t get involved in the first place,” says Jonathan Barzdik, membership and communications specialist for AmericanHort. “But consistency can be scheduling three posts on Monday morning and taking 45 minutes to figure out what that message is going to be. It can be finding someone who is really comfortable on their smartphones and is willing, anytime they see a really great looking crop, to snap a picture and push it out to your fan base.”

Finding what works for your social media pages can be a years-long learning process. Just ask Kindal Marin, the director of marketing for Bell Nursery. Bell enjoys a sizable Facebook presence (with likes topping out at close to 16,000), and is visible on several other platforms including: Pinterest, Twitter, and Instagram. But the company is still experimenting with different strategies, trying to optimize its social media presence.

The company joined Facebook in early 2010 and has been growing steadily since. Getting Bell’s page to almost 16,000 likes was a gradual process that involved a lot of trial and error.

“We’re trying to see what gets the comments, the feedback, the engagement, the followers,” Martin says. “We’re really looking for the engagement. It’s that one-on-one dialogue that we’re striving for.”

A look at the Bell Facebook page has at least one consistent theme: pictures. Marin, who operates the Facebook page and most of Bell’s social presence, says that people respond consistently to images, which is why Bell’s page is filled with standalone photographs and sunny photo albums.

“The posts that get the most likes are generally single pictures of flowers. We get a lot of great feedback like last season, when we posted pictures of butterflies on a flower,” says Marin.

And while there aren’t hard and fast rules for social media, there are trends to be aware of, Barzdik says. “There’s no question that we are an incredibly visual industry, and social media is moving rapidly in the visual direction. There’s the uptick in Pinterest, photographs showing up in Twitter, Facebook values photos more all the time, and Instagram is exploding.”
 

Get interactive

With spring and summer in the air, the demand for high-res flower photos is higher than ever. After a long and often torturous winter, people are eager for signs of blooming life. Bell Nursery, and other growers, can supply those images, and hopefully drive people to buy some flowers in the process.

Image-heavy posts were part of the early Facebook strategy for Bell. Gary Mangum, Bell’s CEO and president, has the other set of keys for Bell’s social media pages. “Basically the (Facebook) strategy started with showing photographs of what we were shipping at the time; we’d have some conversation around what was shipping, and what might be coming out next week. People like to know what’s new, so we would talk about new products, new varieties, new colors, and new genetics.”

The Bell page evolved over time, until it became the leviathan of Facebook likes it is today. That evolution included a number of road blocks, though.

One of the other buzzwords in social media “How-to” articles is “interactivity.” Your social media page should be a dialogue between you and your audience, resulting in new customers.

A primary method for engaging your audience, according to these articles, is to ask them questions, especially on Facebook. The theory is that people will see your question and be compelled to research your content and respond. Sometimes that works.

For Bell Nursery, it didn’t.

“If you read the how-to’s on social media, it’s a lot of “Ask questions” and “Get people involved by asking them questions!” says Marin. “When I ask a question on our Facebook page, it is almost always a complete flop. So that isn’t what works for us, even if it is an industry ‘white hat standard’ of how you engage people.”

Instead, she found that single photographs often got the best response for Bell. She also noticed that responses increased exponentially during the months leading up to spring. So she increased her photo-based posting leading up to the season.
 

Facebook advertising

When Bell’s page likes started to plateau, Marin and Mangum considered Facebook advertising. Promoting your content, and your page, through the platform’s software can be incredibly beneficial. It can vastly increase your page likes, expand your reach, and expose your brand to individuals who might otherwise live their lives unaware of your existence.

It also has drawbacks.

“Advertising was another trial-and-error thing for us,” Marin says. “We wanted to see what we got (with advertising). Were we getting meaningful followers, if we get the ‘likes,’ are we getting ‘unlikes’ that follow?”

For some, the avalanche of likes that accompany advertising dollars don’t always translate to a boost in your bottom line. Jonathan Barzdik believes that advertising can be beneficial to some growers and a black hole for others.

“It will successfully extend your reach, but the question is what’s the value of the people you’re attracting?” he asks.

Bell Nursery, whose products are sold through Home Depot, found the boost in social presence to be helpful. It was able to target who received its message, paring down from states, to regions, to cities. Any city that had a Home Depot that sold Bell products could be individually targeted for Facebook advertising. Targeted advertising also increased the chance of dialogue and feedback.

“We get a lot of direct feedback and a lot of private messages, such as, ‘When is this coming?’ ‘I’m looking for this; do you have it? Can you help me?’ Marin says. “So it really gives us the ability to treat our customers independently.”

That feedback, in turn, helps Bell determine which plants it should be carrying and what plants it should consider adding to its lineup.

“If people are consistently asking on social media for something that we don’t have, it tells us we should be exploring adding that thing,” Mangum says.

The strong Facebook presence, boosted by advertising, has also converted social media followers into paying customers. “I know that we have definitely been successful in helping to push people into the stores,” Mangum says. “People that I’m personal friends with have thanked me for letting them know about this or that via the Facebook mechanism, and we get a lot of consumer comments in the store, saying they follow us on Facebook.”

From a marketing perspective, Marin feels that creating a one-on-one relationship with a customer, via Facebook (or other social platform), will increase Bell’s brand viability and create a loyal customer. That customer, in turn, can create other loyal customers and more Facebook likes.

For Bell as a whole, Facebook creates a social forum to interact with customers. The Bell website is mostly used as an anchor for information. If a customer wants information on a particular pest, they can find those details on the Bell website. If they want to ask about whether or not Bell will carry a Venus Fly Trap? That’s a question more likely to be asked, and answered, via Facebook.